A call center is a service company which provides operator-assisted voice services. A call center is comparable to a telephone center in which a group of specific employees, “agents”, handle telephone inquiries. Typical areas of use are mail-order companies, insurance companies and customer service and also customer hot lines.
In order to increase the utilization level of a call center, “outbound call centers” are known, which are forms of organization in which the agents at the call center do not just handle incoming calls but also actively make outgoing telephone calls at times when there is a low level of traffic. A call center which also deals with outgoing traffic becomes a sales instrument which can actively conduct telephone marketing and can also gain new customers. Redesignating an agent who initially handles only incoming calls as an agent who actively makes outgoing telephone calls can be done automatically by technical equipment at the call center. In addition, an “automatic call distributor” can also combine agents into groups which are temporarily responsible for a particular area. The tasks of these groups can alternate.
At a call center, it is normal for callers to be put into queues at peak times and for the assignment of the call handlers to be changed on the basis of the length of the queue. At a mixed call center, agents handling outbound traffic can be switched to groups with inbound tasks for a short while. This means that the call center can be flexibly adapted to a fluctuating traffic volume.
At a call center, various communication channels converge. Each of the agents has efficient access both to product databases and to customer databases. The services provided by a call center therefore increasingly go beyond voice services and comprise general data transmission.
A call center can be incorporated in different company divisions, such as marketing, market research, consulting, sales/marketing and customer services and also other services.
As the task area grows, the complexity of a call center's organization increases. If the number of employees at a call center was initially frequently below one hundred, call centers with up to more than one thousand agents are known today. These agents are not based at a central office, but rather their workplace is in spatially distributed offices, possibly even in private residences. This means that the call center's organization can also be divided into units which are distributed over a plurality of locations.
Normally, each of these locations is connected by means of subscriber lines to a switching node in a wide area network, for example the integrated services digital communication network ISDN, and the organization units are networked to one another. A wide area network normally extends to a national space and comprises both terrestrial landline networks and mobile radio networks, which means that a large number of communication subscribers can communicate with one another simultaneously. The Internet, as a global network, is increasingly joining up with regional public or formerly public telecommunication networks which were originally designed exclusively for voice transmission. This structure of the communication networks normally incorporates distributed call centers.
If an outbound call center transmits information to the outside, user channels in the communication network are engaged. The physical length of the user channels is prescribed by the local distance between data source and data sink. The scope of the information which is to be transmitted fluctuates depending on the service provided by the call center: information relating to the sale of products is usually more extensive than automatic greeting or reminder information or than a wakeup call. Particularly with short messages, such as greeting and reminder messages, the involvement for setting up the connection and for engaging user channels is comparatively high. Comparatively high transmission costs are incurred. These are transferred according to the role of the party involved, i.e. network operator, service operator, service provider or service customer. The operator of a call center is interested in keeping down the transmission costs incurred for operating the call center as much as possible.